Barb's Dictionary

This is Barb.

Barb is my spiritual advisor when it comes to decorating and crafts. One Christmas she drove 20 miles to give me advice on decorating my house for Christmas. We went with a poinsettia staircase to rave reviews.

This is the vintage dictionary that Barb bought for 99 cents on eBay. Barb is the reason God created eBay.

Look how thick that puppy is! That's a LOT of dictionary pages. 





I love dictionary pages. Barb loves dictionary pages. We are sympatico. If we were on Pinterest, we would follow each other.

Wait, we are on Pinterest and we do follow each other. Barb is the reason God created Pinterest.

Barb does not fold dictionary pages; she wallpapers with them. Here is Barb's bathroom.

Barb carefully cut each of those dictionary pages to size and then Mod Podged them onto her bathroom walls. Barb has created my dream bathroom.

This is the bouquet I (finally) made for Barb for helping me decorate my house that Christmas.

I made the vase from a copy of The Winston Simplified Dictionary that I found in an antique store.

It was a win-win. Barb got the bouquet and I got the dictionary pages. I love to make flowers from dictionary pages.

Here are the flowers I made from The Winston Simplified Dictionary.

Here are some dark-centered flowers I made from Barb's gigantic dictionary. See how the small, tight font of the dictionary flowers plays against the more generous font of other books? That is why I love dictionary pages.



 And here is Barb in a scene from her recent European vacation reimagined as a pop-up card.

The outside

The inside

(Look, Barb, we can print on dictionary pages, too!)

When Fate Pops In

The other day I realized that I have a problem.

OK, another problem. (Did I mention I'm a hoarder?)

I make many of my projects from Readers Digest Condensed Books (RDCB). (Oh yeah, I did mention that I'm a hoarder.) That's because RDCBs have a lot of pages, are easy to find, and have stellar covers!

Case in point, here's Volume 90 from 1972.

Open up an RDCB, however, and it is filled with kitschy pictures like this 

 

 (Harold Goldfluss? Really?) or this

(Fifty Shade of Grey meets The Patriot!)

So these pictures are great fun to look at, but whenever I start a project I have to tear them out or they ruin the look of the folded book. And now I have this...



...a stack of kitschy pictures. A stack big enough to be its own RDCB. I've been trying to figure out what to do with them. And then...serendipity.

A couple of weeks ago we were vacationing in Mendocino, CA (go there!) when I happened upon the Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle's Children's Books (bookstore + vacation = happy, happy, joy, joy!). That's when I found this:

The Pocket Paper Engineer, Volume 3: V-Folds: How to Make Pop-Ups Step-by-Step, Of course! Pop-ups + kitschy pictures = more fun with books! So here's my first endeavor, a greeting card. The outside:



and the inside:

So OK, it's a fairly simple pop-up and it doesn't actually fit in any envelope, but I had great fun making it. I'm definitely sticking with this.

Those of you with kids (or who were once kids themselves) should really check out the Pocket Paper Engineer series. Lots of fun for all ages with tear out projects on every page. I own all three books now. (Did I mention I'm a...yes, yes, I did mention that.) 

 

Oh wait, I just found one of my favorite pictures. Caption anyone?